The Freitas era

http://co.marin.ca.us/depts/lb/main/crm/oralhistories/freitasft.html

The Freitas family bought the Lucas home, and maintained the 'home ranch' in what's now Terra Linda (named by one of the Freitas daughters).

John Lucas sold it to Manuel T Freitas Sr, who was from the azores. John Lucas' wife Maria had a separate property somewhere out Lucas Valley road perhaps in the Nicasio watershed.

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nine kids one d young
marie Freitas Crane born 1898
Manuel born at the 'home ranch' in May 1900. He went to San raphael's grammar school, dairy farmer, hunter. married, childless

Carlos was born on the Freitas Home Ranch in 1904. he became a lawyer, judge. married, childless

Ed 1907 3 dtrs

Louis born on the home ranch o 1910. dairy business, bachelor.
Walter born in their San rafael place in 1911 because 'the old horse and buggy days, the family used to come into town in the wintertime.' he had 3 children. one son david was on the Board of the Marin County Historical Society.

rose freitas Rose, son/dtr. her son? died as a result of an injury he suffered on the dairy ranch 1942 dtr Helen Freitas Tichenor, who is just a little older than Carl and younger than Manuel, she resides here in Marin County now; she was married to Sheldon Bailey Wright for many years and they had two sons, each of whom is still living, one of whom is living in the county here now and the other is back east in Illinois,

Manuel T. Freitas Sr. was born in 1853 on the island of Sao Jorge in the Portuguese Azores. he came here to California from the Azores at abt age 17 in abt 1869 in steerage on a Portuguese Schooner and that he owed three hundred dollars for his passage money to someone back there in the Azores when he arrived here. When he passed through the arms of the Statue of Liberty, that he then came directly to San Francisco. He had his total education in the Azores Islands, consisting of three years in grammar school. He had great difficulty in writing Portuguese and of course, he wrote, spoke, no English. He went to work as a dishwasher in a Portuguese restaurant on Front Street in San Francisco, very close to the Embarcadero.then became a cook, the chef, then he owned the restaurant, then he owned the hotel later. I think that the reason he came to San Francisco was that a friend of his had a job in this restaurant, and my father had this job as dishwasher awaiting him. Most Portuguese, of course, used to stay in Massachusetts and the fishing industry.

after some years he finally became a commission merchant, engaged mostly as a middle-man buying agricultural produce from the farmer and selling it to the urbanized customers in San Francisco. And in turn buying things at the farm from parties in San Francisco so that he, speaking both Portuguese and English, could determine the needs of the Portuguese dairymen in Marin County. With his acquiring knowledge of English he was able to buy and do business with people in San Francisco who spoke English and thus serve the Portuguese community in Marin County.

He became very well acquainted with the dairymen from Marin County. When they came to San Francisco they would be required to stay overnight; it then was a long trip. And we did not have the ferries or the Golden Gate Bridge or any such method of transportation. We had very slow boats and there was the horse and buggy to get to Sausalito. Consequently they would always stay overnight at his hotel on Front Street near the Embarcadero. And through this relationship and through his experience in financial affairs, he had always, even from his youth, been very much interested in finances. And then he, with proper advice from legal council, established this Portuguese American Bank at Front and Clay Streets in San Francisco. In the bank was the, also on the second floor, were the offices of the Portuguese Consul in San Francisco. He in turn had been a vice-council in Portugal and this gave him an acquaintance with Portuguese throughout Northern California and was a nucleus for the customers for the Portuguese American Bank

he came to Marin and started acquiring his property around 1896, the same year he married Maria Bettencourt? She was also born in the Island of San Jorge. And her father was a captain of a fishing fleet, as it were. I think it might have been two or three ships but they called him captain in any event. And he unfortunately went down with the ship on one of their trips off the Newfoundland coast. When they were over there fishing off the Newfoundland coast for tuna. And then at the age of three her mother brought her to the east coast of the United States, I believe Providence, Rhode Island or there about. And from there, I believe she was there for about two years, and then her mother had re-married, a man by the name of Sylvester; later his name became Smith when he arrived in California. And this was a frequent occurrence among Portuguese, changing names, because two men with the same name might be getting their mail mixed up. So one would change names so his mail wouldn't get mixed up with the other and his identity would be established. In any event, she and, that is my mother and her mother and her stepfather, ended up at the Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio, in what is now Corte Madera in Marin County. And I believe my mother was at the age of five or six at that time. And then she was placed as a boarding student at the Dominican Convent in San Rafael and she learned, of course, all her English there and she graduated from the high school in 1916, or rather at the age of 16, at which time she married my father. He was then 43 years of age.

she was ill the last few years of her life and I was only eight when she died. However, I remember her as a very beautiful woman, very kind woman, the only complaint I ever heard my father make about my mother was that she tried to give his money away faster than he could make it, give it away to help the poor who used to come to the ranch or to our house in town with their needs. Mother died in March 20, 1919 as a result of cancer and she had been bedridden for about the last year as I recall. I was only seven when she died which means I was only six when she stopped taking care of us really. She was very much interested in teaching my father how to read, write and speak English. She was a very good teacher and he became quite adept at all three. And also at the time of her death she left my father with eight children. There was always at least two in help in the house and this I think was a time when all of us were placed in boarding schools because father was not in the position to take care of eight children. Now another thing about my mother is that she was active in the ladies’ Portuguese lodges. There is a Portuguese lodge in Novato, which is named the Maria T. Freitas Lodge.

the home ranch was this the first ranch he acquired. It was approximately 1186 acres. Manuel Freitas says It was a horse ranch for the Lucas Family. bought it in 1896 but he did not operate it, leased it out.

This Lucas property had been at one time an original land grant given to Timoteo Murphy, I believe. Santa Margarita, Las Gallinas and San Pedro. He was the third owner of this property. Murphy, Lucas and then Freitas.

Of course my recollection of it, it was primarily a dairy ranch. I don't remember it as a horse ranch. I guess my father gradually converted it into a dairy ranch where he milked 250 head of dairy cattle and sold the milk into San Francisco. And there was a great deal of produce raised on the place too because of the transportation problems and there were a lot of people on the ranch who would work the ranch; there were a lot of people in the big home. Freitas did a great deal of entertaining there too. guests all the time, the house consisted of three floors. It was surrounded by substantial formal gardens and my father's orchard. there was a family orchard there and this took quite a little colony of people to operate it. And much of the food required by this group was raised right there on the ranch in the orchard and the vegetable gardens around there. Also there were chickens and pigeons and calves and everything. Meat was largely provided right there on the ranch as well as the vegetables. It was a wonderful place in which to live. It was a beautiful ranch, and a lot of trees and meadows.

The main drive lead from the Petaluma Road. We had a lane of about three quarters of a mile, a tree lined lane. It was a great place to hunt; I think that's where most of the boys got their love for hunting, whether it was rabbits or deer or so forth.There were lots of quail on the ranch, and deer, and rabbits. chores: wood stove for cooking, wood for fireplaces, you had to keep those well stacked with wood, firewood and kindling. Then we did all the cleaning of the paths, cleaning of the head crops, pulling mustard. I think it's fair to say that we did more work than play at the ranch.

if you ever did get any leisure, where would you head for? San Rafael to go to the nickelodeon shows at the old Lyric Theater and the Fox.How would you get there, by horse and buggy or walk?Horse or walk, Twenty-three and a half miles to town.

CE: Of course the train was going then. one of the sons cut through the tunnel. one of the sons practically lived at the baths. That where I learned how to swim. Well we all really learned how to swim in the creek at the home ranch which is now the creek in Terra Linda, which has been straightened out, but in those days it was meandered and had potholes, as it were. We would learn how to swim in those potholes. I remember coming to town here on horseback and bringing my lunch with me and going to the San Rafael Municipal Baths and swimming there all day long then riding horseback home, and that was a full day. But I got those days off on very few occasions and we earned our spending money by working. We did not have any allowance; we had to work for our spending money.

Manuel Freitas was not running the ranch in the early days; he was commuting to San Francisco in pursuit if his commission business and his banking interest. by then they had the electrical trains, Northwestern Pacific, and ferry boats. Northwestern Pacific and ferry boats go to Casadero. He would take the train to Fourth and Tamalpais, where the station is now, the Whistlestop, and to Sausalito then a ferry boat from Sausalito to San Francisco.

They bought a house in town so the boys could go to school at St. Raphael's and so the girls could go to school at the Dominican Convent.


there was no decent roads to get from the ranch to San Rafael in those early days. it was muddy. Of course Puerto Suello Hill was twice as high as it is now. The present Puerto Suello Hill is a result of a tremendous cut in that hill. You can still see where the hill used to be and it was all dirt road and mud in wintertime. When you came in by horse and buggy it would take too long to get the kids to school and too long to take my father to the train. we were always there by October. I think it was mostly the matter of the school term. After the road got hard, in late spring perhaps before the end of the spring semester, we would go back to the ranch.

everybody for the most part spoke Portuguese in the home. We had Portuguese servants. My father and mother spoke Portuguese; we spoke Portuguese at the family table and so forth. we spoke Portuguese before we spoke English. When we went to school we were made fun of because we couldn't speak English. house at lutens and fifth. I'm old enough to remember Fourth Street as a dirt street with wooden planks on the sidewalks.Were there really as many saloons on Fourth Street as they tell?

CF: There was more than they tell. sometimes three on a corner. there was nothing much else to do in town.

we had our first automobile in 1910, a fire engine red Buick.our mother died that year and your father immediately stopped commuting to take care and be at home for the youngest children. Would that be you, Louis, Walter and at that time Edward?

he did continue his work until shortly before his death. 1923, four years after my mother. he was 70. when my dad passed away Manuel was already operating the whole dairy of the Freitas ranch which is now Terra Linda.

father bought a ranch every time a son was born. So there must have been other ranches.

when he died he had five sons and he had five ranches, but he didn't buy one every time one of us was born. Mary Courtright was the town of Larkspur City Clerk for many, many years. She told me of a conversation she had with my father on the Richmond Ferry. They were coming across the bay and she was in conversation with my father and he told her, as she later told me, " Well I'm going to have to go out and buy another ranch now because I just had another son." That was supposed to be I who was born at that time and so he had to go out and buy another ranch. And that's what she told me and the fact of the matter is that by the time of his death, he owned six ranches and he had six sons.

One ranch was the C Ranch up at Novato; that was about 2,000 acres and that's where San Marin is now. Another one was what we called the Upper Ranch in Lucas Valley and right adjacent to it was the, what we called the Butcher Ranch. That was about 325 acres.

The Upper Ranch was 1116 acres, and these three were all contiguous, The Upper Ranch, The Butcher Ranch, and the Home Ranch.

Then we had a ranch up at Cordelia, where the Red Top restaurant now is in Solano County, and also another ranch near Novato called The Black Point Ranch, where the Atherton road cut off goes between Black Point and Novato, a little over 300 acres.

these were mainly dairy ranches

in those years, there were just a few of the large dairies in central and southern Marin who shipped to San Francisco; the others were butter contractors.

The ones in west Marin were all butter fat ranches.

how would you get the milk to San Francisco? If you were near the railroad station then the dairymen would haul it to the railroad station, see. You shipped it to San Francisco once a day, in ten gallons cans, there were no tankers in those days.

the milk would have to be kept refrigerated at the ranch because if it went only once a day, you see, especially in summertime, it would spoil unless it was kept under refrigeration.

It was all hand milkers of course in those early days. The milkers mostly all were Portuguese. From the Azores, practically all Portuguese from the coast and Nicasio. Where there were Swiss and Italian dairymen. There were a lot of Swiss milkers, Swiss, Italian milkers. But they milked by hand for a good many years, until the first milking machines.

Each ranch provided housing for these people. They were fed, but not included in the family gatherings. separate cook houses. they had bunkhouses. Most of the milkers were unmarried people and they lived right there on the ranch and most of them had no means of transportation. In later years, of course, they began to have automobiles. They began to come along in couples. But at that time there would be separate bunkhouses, separate cookhouses. The men would stay there. They would milk thirty cows by hand twice a day; then they would get four days off maybe at the end of the month and then they'd go to San Francisco and have a big time. You'd hope that they would come back in time to resume their schedule. Sometimes they did and many times they didn't. But they would stay and save their money and then after they had accumulated some why they would borrow some and ultimately they'd go off to some little dairy ranch of their own and start in their own dairy business.

quite a few men on ranches in Marin served their apprenticeship with your father. Joe Pimentel up in Sonoma. he had been brought over from the Azores Islands by my father and given a job there and that's the year that I was born. don't know if the Nunes boys’ father ever worked for my father but he was -- The Nunes boys still operate up at Novato.

milking by hand in those days was of course a difficult job. they milked about 30 cows a day, a split shift. Go to work at 1:30 in the morning and maybe milk until about 6:00 and clean up and have breakfast and then go out and do a little work around the ranch for a few hours and then maybe have a little rest before lunch and then milk again around 1:30 in the afternoon. I remember that if they became ill or for any reason discontinued milking for a while it was always very difficult for them to start in again because their hands were weak. I often saw people where other milkers would have to come and help them out. They weren't able to finish their string until they had gotten in shape again. I also remember, I think it was in 1942, when at the Terra Linda Ranch we first changed from hand milking to machine milking. During the war, of course, it was very difficult to get help, some of those young milkers were able to go to San Francisco and get jobs on the docks and so forth. I remember sometimes we would have three or four older men trying to milk 25 or 30 cows, so Manuel made the decision to change from hand milking into machine.

Pasture was used mostly in the spring, when grass is green for milk production, otherwise we'd use more hay for cattle. The green grass season -- Then when that died up we went to supplemental feeding of alfalfa and grain.

Different parts of the county there are more Jerseys; they adapted themselves better to the west coast and eventually in central and southern Marin they went to straight Holstein herds for larger production.

We had some light springs where it didn't rain until February or March. We've had light rains, light grass, but never a drought. The closest I've ever seen to it in the dairy business was approximately $95.00 a ton; it should be around fifty dollars, 45 or 50. We're now shipping it in today from Idaho, Oregon and Washington to take care of the situation.

In these six dairy ranches which he had, in three,the Home Ranch, the Upper Ranch and the C Ranch in Novato. he always was a partner but he became a partner by putting men into positions where they would have a half interest and he would have a half interest. to finance these good dairymen and to make money for himself.

Solano County Ranch and Black Point Ranch and Butcher Ranch were always under lease, not a partnership.

what happened, gentlemen, in Marin County, to cause you to eventually break up the ranches and sell some of your land for the inevitable subdivisions?

we first sold some ranches during the depression. I think that was the primary reason; we were land poor. Some of these ranches, as Manuel said, were under lease and sometimes they weren't able to pay their rents but we had to pay the taxes. We sold the Black Point Ranch quite early in the game, long before World War II came along. just prior to 38, 39. We sold the Cordelia Ranch during World War II.

Then they hiked the assessments when they started to build around us so that the dairy cattle could no longer make a profit for us. this large influx of people after World War II. pressures were put upon you, I imagine, after World War II to relinquish some of this land, wasn't it, by developers?

My father left what he owned to his children and so there were eight owners and some of them were in different circumstances. And during the depression, since, at that time, Manuel and I first entered into the dairy business in 1932, and we had a brother-in-law who was engaged in the dairy business but the others were not and here we had several ranches, not all of them right here in the county. And because of the economic problems involved we began to liquidate little by little. But then after we sold the Cordelia Ranch, the Black Point Ranch, and then we had the four right here in Marin County, the C Ranch up in Novato and three ranches here in Lucas Valley, that was after the housing situation began to boom in Marin County and then the assessor began to assess land, dairy land, as potential sub-division. They would assess it on a value of $2,000 an acre or so and you couldn't run cows on there. As we used to say, the people will pay more for land than the cows will and you were just forced out of business, not only ourselves but many other dairymen. They sold their ranches and moved their herds up to Sonoma County where the land was not valued so highly for tax purposes. We had a situation at the C Ranch in Novato the year following the World War II where the entire income from dairying purposes was less than the tax bill, so we were losing money. We were getting the maximum rental on the property that dairying could afford but the tax was so high because of potential subdivision that it just forged us into liquidation.

around the early 1950s regarding the Home Ranch property? Pressure had been brought to sub-divide, we couldn't pay the taxes there either so we began to succumb to the pressures to develop it and we entered into a contract with a man by the name of George Goheen in, Manuel's birthday, May 22, 1953, to turn it over to him in stages for purposes of residential development. And then he in turn brought in some other fellows and started work on July 1,1954. They broke ground for a residential subdivision and we terminated the dairy operation at that time because there's something incompatible about trying to run a dairy with homes, and dogs and cows and cats and manure and flies, right along someone who just bought a nice new home and just moved over from San Francisco and they don't want to be suffering those inconveniences. So we terminated the activities there and gradually developed. Different people came along; Joe Eichler came along, and they would buy up a small piece of ground and develop it and sell it and then he'd come back and buy another piece. So that's the way it went.


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In 1954 they closed the ranch and ultimately they donated the original house, on a ten acre quadrangle, to the Catholic Church, expecting that there would be a rectory and a school. because of vandalism the Lucas home, which was built in 1868, was razed. it's just off what's now the Freitas parkway, between Las Pavadas and Las Gallinas, on Trinity. Originally, the home was 3/4 of a mile up from the Petaluma road. The Freitas sons recalled, one of my father's favorite occupations, after dinner, was to take his children on a long walk down, oh, three quarters of a mile, out to the Petaluma Road and back and discuss things with us and so forth. I remember at the time being eight or nine years of age and he said, "Someday all of this property is going to be covered with houses, homes.” He said, “Of course, I'll never see it and I don't think you will, but your children will." And we used to shake our heads and think that perhaps senility had begun to set in, but he was pretty farsighted. Maybe that's why he was such a good businessman.



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In the teens, 20s and 30s in upper lucas valley and lucas valley:

http://co.marin.ca.us/depts/lb/main/crm/oralhistories/frodgersFT.html
Rodgers writes about the bootlegging in Nicasio. but mostly people went over to San Anselmo and out, due to the rail lines. They had a store in Nicasio with bocce ball.


"AK: Why didn't you use the Lucas Valley Road? Was it so bad?

FR: Because it was a little bit longer. The only stop on Lucas Valley Road was, as you recall afterwards, was the Mile Inn, they called it, and Marty McDonalds. Do you recall Marty McDonalds? Well, Marty McDonalds was a roadside stop, a bar, saloon. It was right across, of course it has all been changed now, but it was right across from where the restaurant is now, out there at the intersection.

CE: Oh, yes, it used to be the Chateau.

FR: It was right across the street, long gone. So there was less stops there for Pa."

sometime in the teens and 20s during prohibition -- "The Barr brothers -- Remember Doctor Arthur Barr and Tom Barr? They were dentists. There's only one left now. They had all that country out there for the deer hunting and they had a big deer camp at the head of Lucas Valley which is now got a residence on it. And, of course, my dad -- And then we bought the Model T Ford in 1917 and Saturday night was always a big night at the deer camp. They had a big feed and carousing going on, ready for the big hunt on Sunday morning. So my dad and I, I had to take my Dad because he didn't drive, so we'd go up to the deer camp and this -- He was head of the PG&E at the time. I can't recall his name, but apparently Pa said to him, he said, “See what you can do for the son; he needs a job.”

In about 1933 or 34 Mr Blake met his wife: There's twelve years difference in ages. She graduated in '32; I'm twelve years older. But, anyway, at that time I think we were trying to form an alumni association at San Rafael High and I became involved in that; I'm the president of the Alumni Association. So we're getting ready for a dance and Ruth was on the committee and somehow or other we hit it up out in Lucas Valley to get huckleberries to decorate the hall and she was, still is, attractive, you know. And I was besmitten. Is that the proper word, besmitten? Well, anyway, that was the beginning of it. So we got married in 1934